As chief blogger for Project Health Design and colleague Lygeia Riccardi notes in her post, Project Health Design Blog: The PHR as a mirror of daily life, project teams for this initiative to inform the next generation of personal health records was in Washington, DC, this week to work with policy makers and collaborate across teams, and I was invited along with Lygeia to meet the teams on one of their first nights here, at a reception.

I was epecially happy to catch up with colleague James Ralston, MD, MPH, from Group Health Cooperative’s Center for Health Studies, who is leading one of the teams, and of course, one of my first questions to him was, “how have you involved patients in this work?” His answer was a great one: “Well, Ted, I’ve brought a patient with me.”

As you can see from Lygeia’s post, there was a patient (participant was the term she used) from another team as well. Both are supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in attending and improving the efforts of these teams. Kudos.